Bulgaria v England. 02/09/11

"Why would anybody who looks like Janet Street Porter think their calling in life is to run a fetish club?"

Bulgaria 0-3 England. Vasil Levski Stadium.
Friday 02/09/11.

The first rule of going abroad - always check the weather forecast. Something that was dearly forgotten for this trip to Sofia for England's Euro 2012 qualifier with Bulgaria.

Boiling hot weather and one pair of jeans is a combination that goes about as well together as Nick Griffin being a guest speaker at Martin Luther King day. So when you pack just one pair of hot, stuffy denim jeans for four days away it's pretty much a disaster.

Alexander Nevski Cathedral

Apart from the wardrobe malfunction, this was a wonderful trip. It's doubtful many people would pick Sofia as a holiday destination but when the weather is good, the women are unbelievable, it's dirt cheap, you can fly there with easyJet for £40 and accommodation is £12 a night then you are always onto a winner.

Of course, there was a drawback to that accommodation and that was sharing a double bed. Thankfully, our lovely lady host at the appartment we booked turned out to not be homophobic and was more than happy to allow two strapping gents to bunk up together in her place. Although she may have just tolerated it for the fact she knew we'd go the entire four nights without any hot water. We'll never know.

Soviet Army Monument - rolled up jeans because
of the heat!

Having arrived on the Tuesday and with the game not until the Friday night,we had plenty of time to explore Sofia. Bulgaria is quite a religious country with a number of grand churches including the Alexander Nevski Cathedral which was rather beautiful. We spent our first day checking out the sights which included the cathedral and the wonderful Soviet Army Monument which features a Soviet soldier surrounded by Bulgarian women. There is a lot of debate about whether it should be pulled down but it serves as a great meeting place with people skating around it and was even home to the England Fanzone on the Friday before the game.

Wednesday was another day of looking around including a trip to Sofia Central Station. Why go to the station I hear you cry? Well, we'd heard rumours that on the last England trip to Sofia there had been a bear caged outside of it so we set off in the vain hope that would still be the case. It wasn't but it wasn't a completely wasted journey either as Tom managed to pick up a hideous Barack Obama t-shirt for just £2 from a market stall. Yes we can!

Tom delighted with his £2 Mister President t-shirt

We did eventually get to see a bear by spending Thursday at Sofia Zoo. Now I pride myself on being something of a zoo expert and this was easily the most unsafe place you could go to. The bear enclosures were just slabs of concrete with a little bit of water you could climb into and for the truly adventurous you could stick your hands through the bars into the lion and tiger enclosures.

Bear in his concrete enclosure at Sofia Zoo

Feeling adventerous? Reach through the bars and touch a tiger

The best part about Sofia however has to be the food and drink. Well, maybe not the drink, but certainly the food. And certainly the magnificent chain of restaurants that are aptly known as Happy Grill. At Happy Grill, you could buy an industrial sized plate of varrying meats and a bicycle wheel sized piece of garlic bread for £4.20. Throw in cocktails for £2 and it was very very happy indeed.

Barnsley fans on the Soviet Monument on game day

Unfortunately, the beer was mainly horrific. Among those tried were Zagorka, Wymechko and Astika. At £1.20 a pint we weren't complaining and got through our fair share. The best places to drink were outside bars, set up in tents in the middle of parks. Every bar we found seemed to shut at midnight during the week which at one point forced us into the only open place we could find in an attempt to continue drinking - a fetish club. I say club, it was more like an underground prison, we were the only people who had been brave enough to venture in and didn't even get around to ordering a beer, deciding to bolt before a woman who looked suspiciously like Janet Street Porter managed to get us into what presumably would have been her red room of pain. 

England Fanzone

As for game day, the already mentioned fanzone in the gardens around the Soviet Monument is where we spent our time drinking. At £1 a pint it was the cheapest beer we had all trip yet you had to keep your wits about you with footballs flying through the air, a potential hit at any time. The Monument itself was popular to climb and there was music being played to sing along to with the DJ obviously being a big fan of the Champions League theme tune, playing it every five songs.

Vasil Levski from the outside. Sponsored by Pepsi

Inside the Vasil Levski Stadium

The Vasil Levski Stadium was a short walk through the park and was exactly what you'd expect from an Eastern European multipurpose venue. Running track? Check. Uncovered? Check. One large stand? Check. Fences? Check. Flares? Check. Monkey noises from the home fans for Ashley Cole and Ashley Young? Check.

Bulgarian fans raise the flag

It wouldn't be Eastern Europe without flares and fireworks

The ground was reasonably full and those England fans who had got tickets for the home ends were escorted around the running track and into the away section before kick off, meaning that our section had up to 500 more fans in that it should have done. The game itself was pretty dull - Bulgaria were absolutely awful and England were 3-0 up by half time through Gary Cahill and a Wayne Rooney brace meaning it was game over in 45 minutes. No matter, we still couldn't leave as the police wouldn't let anybody out even at the break which meant the frustration of not only watching a pointless second half but then being held in for an hour afterwards while the home support were cleared.

The teams line up for the national anthems amid the smoke
of the home fans flares

We headed straight back to the apartment after the game with an early flight to come from Sofia to Berlin with Bulgarian Airways. Such was the type of plane we were flying on, you half expected a man like Biggles in World War II fighter pilot gear to stride from the terminal, bottle of whiskey in hand to fly the plane. Incredibly, we made it to Germany in one piece and spent the day mooching around Berlin before flying back to England in the evening.

Where I could finally take those bloody jeans off.

England players at the end of the game

Happy Grill certainly lived up to it's name with all this meat
for £4.20

Home via Berlin and the Brandenburg Gate

Bulgaria: Nikolay Mihaylov, Zhivko Milanov, Ivan Ivanov, Nikolay Bodurov, Ivan Bandolovski (Georgi Sarmov), Petar Zanev, Stiliyan Petrov, Martin Petrov, Blagoy Georgiev, Ivelin Popov (Marquinhos), Tsvetan Genkov (Georgi Bozhilov).

England: Joe Hart, Chris Smalling, John Terry, Gary Cahill 1, Ashley Cole, Gareth Barry (Frank Lampard), Scott Parker, Theo Walcott (Adam Johnson), Ashley Young (James Milner), Stewart Downing, Wayne Rooney 2.

Attendance: 27,230

Switzerland v England. 07/09/10

"Sam, we've got to get up. This police officer is pointing a gun at us"

Switzerland 1-3 England. St Jakobs Park.
Tuesday 07/09/10.

Traveling on public transport in France is a task full of inherent risk. That risk comes from the communists and peasants who make up the French nation spending 90% of their working lives on strike and it was this cruel fate that so nearly ruined the journey to Basel for England's opening Euro 2012 qualifier against Switzerland.

In an attempt to save money, we decided to let the train take the strain, catching the Eurostar from St Pancras to Paris and then a TGV service from the French capital south to Basel, nicely nestled on Switzerland's borders with France and Germany.

Thanks to a typically French strike, we were able to use two
spare hours in Paris to find the Arc de Triomphe

Yet thanks to a number of work-shy Frogs, our booked train was cancelled meaning we had to catch one two hours later than planned and due to the strike, this train was utterly packed with standing room only. Standing next to a toilet in a small corridor is not the best way to spend a four hour journey, not even when you have a crate of Kronenbourg and are sharing the impossibly tiny space with a very beautiful woman. She unfortunately did not speak English. Either that or she pretended she couldn't to avoid talking to us, which in fairness is more likely and a pretty shrewd move.

Standing up next to a toilet for a four hour train journey.
At least we had some beer.

The one good thing about the strike is that it did give us enough time to wander off and see one of the sights of Paris, the Arc de Triomphe. It was a good six miles round trip which was plentiful exercise for a man of my statue.

Despite worries that it would be incredibly tight to make the game given the delay, TGV went a small way to redeeming their lazy workers by getting us to Basel with just over an hour until kick off. We stumbled across Papa Joe's which was what appeared to be a restaurant but was showing the sort of initiative that would get you a long way on Dragons Den by selling cans of beer from crates through it's windows.

Papa Joe's, Basel

Pre-game beers with some friendly Swiss

This was genius in two ways - they would make a lot of additional profit from the Swiss and England fans mingling outside and it also meant that we didn't have to pay the high price of a pint with cans of Feldschlosschen all around. It weighed in at a hearty 5.5% and led to a brilliant atmosphere at Joe's prior to the game, with the Swiss fans showing just why they haven't been involved in a war by being extremely friendly throughout.

Nelson Mandela House or St Jakob Park?

St Jakob Park with 4,000 England fans

St Jakob Park was a short tram journey from the old town area and from the outside resembled a block of flats in Peckham rather than an international football stadium. England had 4,000 tickets in a two tiered stand behind the goal and if you were stuck at the front, there was one massive issue - the rain that was absolutely hammering down. Now watching regular football at Withdean makes you used to getting drenched, but there was an underlying problem in this particular situation in that we were sleeping rough that night before traveling home the following day. Spending the next 24 hours in wet clothes would not be ideal, and so it proved with the dreaded man flu following a few days after getting back to Blighty.

The stand opposite to where we were based was identical to the away section and down both sides were three tiered efforts. The place was packed for the encounter and with their flags and noise, the Swiss were being anything but their normal neutral selfs. It quietened down after just ten minutes when Wayne Rooney scored on the pitch as opposed to in a pensioners bed to put England ahead with his first international goal in over a year and Adam Johnson made it 2-0 in the second half. The wonderfully named Xherdan Shaqiri scored an absolute screamer to give the home side hope but Darren Bent soon extinguished it for a 3-1 win. Six points out six after beating Bulgaria on Friday, job done.

Swiss flags galore

With the rain relenting after the game, we risked the walk back from Nelson Mandela House to the old town as the trams looked absolutely rammed. The name of the game when sleeping rough is to make as much use of bars and nightclubs as possible and we did just that by returning to Papa Joe's which now seemed to have morphed from a restaurant into a club by opening it's top floor as a pure drinking area. There were a number of England fans in here plainly taking the same approach as us with people asleep at tables and the staff of Joe's doing a fine job in just letting them get on with it. If you fall asleep in a pub in England - and I can talk from years of experiences of doing so - you are likely to get a severe talking to from a bouncer and maybe even a barring. But not in good old Basel.

Papa Joe's was more than happy for it's patrons to fall asleep

Sam get's into the spirit, dozing off mid pint

They do have some rules however and when one man was sick off a balcony onto the terrace below that was deemed to have quite rightly crossed a line. Having been up for approaching 24 hours at that point given our 3am departure from Sussex, that seemed as good a point as any to retire to bed - or in this case a set of steps that linked the central station to a car park.

The nights "accommodation" - a stairwell in the station

We only had an hour and a half worth of peace here before being woken up by the unusual sight of a police officer pointing a gun in our faces. This seemed to indicate we had to move on, namely to the main station for more sleep and then to a Starbucks where one small tea was purchased in exchange for another hours kip in a downstairs corner of the coffee chains outlet. Again, we were undisturbed. Try that in England and see what the results are.

FOG ON THE RHINE IS ALL MINE ALL MINE

Basel Cathedral

The rain was still pounding down at this point which meant a quick look at the Rhine and the cathedral was as far as the mornings sightseeing went before the train back to Paris and St Pancras. And do you know what? There wasn't one hitch on the return journey. Rooney scoring for England and the French doing a days work - the wonders simply never cease.

Switzerland: Diego Bengalio, Stephan Lichtsteiner, Steve von Bergen, Stephane Grichting, Reto Ziegler, Xavier Margairaz (Xherdan Shaqiri 1), Gokhan Inler, Pirmin Schwegler (Moreno Costanzo), David Degen (Marco Streller), Alexander Frei, Eren Derdiyok. 

England: Joe Hart, Glen Johnson, Phil Jagielka, Joleon Lescott, Ashley Cole, Gareth Barry, Steven Gerrard, Theo Walcott (Adam Johnson 1), Wayne Rooney 1 (Shaun Wright-Phillips), James Milner, Jermaine Defoe (Darren Bent 1).

Attendance: 37,500